I have a proposition for the real estate industry and our fearless leaders. Here’s the situation:
Mayor Zohran Mamdani is looking to spend more money, not less, but the city is projected to finish its fiscal year June 30 some $2.2 billion in the red. Next year’s gap is $10.4 billion.
In Albany, revenue has been strong enough for Gov. Kathy Hochul to start funding a massive child care program without new taxes, but she needs more to ramp it up and pay for other priorities, such as housing.
Where will they find the cash?
One place could be gambling revenues that for decades have been used to prop up the dying sports of harness and thoroughbred racing.
Such a change would face resistance from at least two major real estate figures: SL Green’s Marc Holliday and GFP Real Estate’s Jeff Gural.
Holliday, a racehorse owner, has chaired the New York Racing Association’s board of directors for four years. Gural owns three harness racing tracks.
“The biggest fear that our industry has is that the states are going to stop subsidizing, using slot machines to subsidize the sport,” Gural acknowledged in an op-ed written by industry critic Noah Shachtman. “Without that, there is no sport.”
Folks like these have political pull; the writer noted that Holliday threw a fundraiser for Hochul at the Saratoga Race Course. But it’s hard to square their business careers with the use of tax revenue to prop up horse racing.
Gural and Holliday are proud capitalists, as is most everybody in real estate — which is one reason many industry people tried to prevent the election of the Democratic socialist Mamdani.
Yes, horse racing sustains thousands of jobs and still draws fans to its biggest events. But subsidizing child care — or any number of things, such as repairing aging buildings — would also create jobs and make people happy. They would probably deliver more bang for the buck, too.
Some investors are profiting from horseracing subsidies, but grandstands are routinely empty. The public has moved on.
Lots of once-thriving industries have withered as people’s interests have changed. We don’t subsidize bowling alleys for the sake of nostalgia and job preservation. Why horse racing? Its workers are often poorly paid and badly treated and its athletes are frequently injured or killed.
Shachtman makes a strong case for letting the industry fend for itself, as we have done for so many others. Dog racing, once active in 18 states, is down to just one, West Virginia. No governments stepped in to save Blockbuster Video, the Yellow Pages or television repair shops.
Real estate makes money, powers the economy and improves Americans’ lives by redeveloping outdated venues into useful ones. Gural and Holliday are doing that right now with the Flatiron Building and 750 Third Avenue, respectively.
If subsidies for horse racing ceased, tracks that failed to survive on their own would be repurposed by developers. Lots of people would profit from the work and the casino revenue being diverted to racing would go somewhere more important.
I hear there’s a housing shortage.
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